Doubts

Written about May 3, 2007

Doubts:

Prove the Bible without using the Bible. I have had this thought for over thirty years.

Is it true because I believe it, or is it true and so I believe it?

Why, if I have been a Christian for over 40 years, has God never answered any of my prayers? Prayers about relationships, where to go to school, what to major in, should I marry this woman or not, should I take this job or not, and so on. There are excuses about why this has happened, but they are just that – excuses.

Why, if God loves me so much that he sent his “only begotten son” to die for me, are answers to prayers obviously not important to him?

If God’s answering depends on the way I ask, or my attitude, then it’s pretty arbitrary. God’s answering is up to me?

The idea that “God can do what he wants because he’s God. He doesn’t answer to me.” That is totally nuts. Sure, He doesn’t answer to me. But the idea that he can do what he wants because he’s God makes him arbitrary in the prayers he answers, capricious, vindictive, malicious, and unreliable.

If it were God’s plan for Jesus to be crucified, why would Judas Iscariot be condemned for carrying out his part in God’s plan?

Did Jesus really exist?

Did God literally, in six twenty-four hour days, create everything? No.

Did Jesus literally die and rise again to be literally alive in a human body? Not.

Was Jesus fully God yet fully human? How could that possibly be? Something cannot be 100% of one thing and 100% of another at the same time. Don't use the old "it's one of God's mysteries" to answer that. If Jesus was fully God, he could not have been tempted as we are since God cannot be tempted. Circle around that one for a while.

We are taught that the same power that raised Jesus from the dead resides in us. If so, we should be able to do, or God do through us, really amazing things. Yet nothing happens. Ah, but the excuse is always, it is something I’m doing wrong. Therefore, puny little me can keep God’s power at bay? That doesn’t make sense at all. So many people, including me think, after salvation, we feel like – nothing happened. Could that be because – nothing happened?

There are inaccuracies, or things that are different from one book to another, in the Bible. In other words – it is not without error. I have noticed this. I am not relying on the scholarship of others to point this out. Different lineage of Jesus in the gospels, same miracle happening at two different times in the narrative of Jesus’ life, errors in the numbers of people in the OT in (I need to look these up again) Numbers vs Chronicles vs Kings, to name a few.